Abandoned Poems Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Stanley Moss

  Published by Seven Stories Press

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  Abandoned Poems is distributed

  in the United Kingdom by Turnaround Ltd.

  and worldwide by Penguin Random House.

  ISBN: 978-1-60980-891-4 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978-1-60980-892-1 (ebook)

  Cover Photo: "Group of Heads"

  by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

  Page 131 Photo: Stanley with two dogs, Margie and Honey;

  Honey in profile and full face.

  Abandoned Poems

  Stanley Moss

  Acknowledgments

  Poetry Chicago, The New York Review Of Books, PN Review, The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Tikkun Magazine, Poetry London, Poem, Reflections: Yale Divinity, Harvard Review, The Yale Review, The Times Literary Supplement, Mānoa (University of Hawaii), The London Magazine.

  Contents

  Chaos

  March 21, First Day of Spring

  Good Morning

  Listen

  Silences

  Get Out

  A Found Poem

  Early Crossing

  After the Fall

  The Sporting Life

  Year of the Rooster

  Motto

  Street Music

  Afterword for Howard Moss

  House Wine

  To My Unborn Friend

  Beachcomber

  After Athens

  Lear’s Wife

  Departing Flight

  In the Swim

  Solo

  December 31, 2016

  Andrzej Rapaczynski in a Coma

  A Watercolor

  Sob

  Poem Without Clouds

  Ode to the Scallop

  Scars, Moon, and Old Stories

  The Fall

  The Day My Roll Top Desk Spoke to Me

  How I Came to Meet the Fates

  Suppose

  Names

  Sunny Day

  Leave it for Now

  June 21, 2017

  Just Born

  Glimpse

  Todavía

  By My Faith

  Stern Stuff

  Laughter

  Healing

  A Jingle

  For John Ashbery, September Song

  Ode to Holy Places

  Blasphemy, or Not As You Like It

  A Visit to Maui

  The Long and Short of It

  A Found Poem

  Epithalamium for Geoffrey G. O'Brien and Hannah Zeavin

  Letter to President Trump

  The Eagle and the Frog

  My Worm

  Hasty Pudding

  Provincial Letter

  January 2nd, 2018

  Yusef Komunyakaa

  It's a Pity

  Italy

  Tra La

  Beyond My Reach

  Reputation

  Happiness

  Thou

  Coat

  All the World's a Page

  Long Abandoned Poems and Apocrypha

  Random

  Wishing

  A Touch

  Forest Fires

  Song of the Present

  The Poem of Self

  Marx Brothers in Moscow

  Unbuntu

  SM

  A Visit to the Devil’s Museum in Kaunas

  Kaunas, Lithuania Memorial

  In the Adirondacks

  Recitative

  Taboo

  The Bathers

  Snake in a Basket of Groceries

  Insomnia

  I Choose

  Postamble

  Water Music

  Pasture

  ABANDONED POEMS

  Un Poème n'est jamais fini, seulement abandoné.

  —Paul Valéry

  Dieu est le seul être qui, pour régner,

  n'ait même pas besoin d'exister.

  —Charles Baudelaire

  Whatever their personal faith,

  all poets, as such,

  are polytheists.

  —W.H. Auden

  The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them;

  and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

  —Isaiah 35:1

  CHAOS

  There are places for chaos on the page,

  meaningful, apparent

  confusion—temps en temps on the continent

  does not mean “time to time” in Kent

  or Greenwich. From stone through weeds and parchment,

  through bad times, words made their way to the printed page.

  Bibles now not just for those who go to worship by carriage,

  but for those who pray with bare feet,

  some washed, some smelling of stables and excrement.

  I’m not sure the words “ocean” and “sea”

  mean the same to you and me.

  Ninety-five percent universal confusion,

  dark matter was born with the legitimacy

  of an onion, the roar of a lion.

  I sit in the rumble seat of judgment,

  I damn myself for entertainment,

  for wasting time on hopeless entertainment.

  I am guilty of snarling lines, Gordian

  knots in my Shakespeare fishing reels.

  I must untangle this because eels

  have hearts like us. The enemy

  is symmetry.

  In the spring of content,

  I trust glorious chaos. I smell in disorder

  the outhouse of order.

  I must have respect for what I kill and eat,

  Jesus gave them loaves and fishes, not meat.

  He added “Waste nothing you eat,”

  he did not say “Waste is chaos made by me,

  or my Father, one person who is three.”

  Rebecca, at the well,

  said “Drink. Water your camels.”

  I swear, my hands each on a Bible,

  the only evidence admissible is invisible.

  At twenty, I was lost in the snow, a sleigh bell.

  Chaos is not a “sometime thing,”

  its face and back are turned to and from us,

  what I cannot see is beautiful, or an isthmus

  that connects almost nothing to almost nothing—

  the great unless, either/or.

  I grab on to metaphor,

  uncertainty, dark matter, gravity specific.

  The motto I nail to my door:

  the Devil generalizes, angels are specific.

  Chaos makes me merry,

  string or rose-by-any-other-rose theory,

  romance of the rose,

  roses that go with any other flower,

  from Devil’s paintbrush to huckleberry.

  From fertile Chaos sprang Eros and Night:

  Chaos danced first with Eros, then jealous Night.

  Time carries a scythe, women and men sound the hour.

  I model for myself, I pose in north light.

  With helpers, his stevedore brothers, Hypnos

  and Thanatos, Charon still poles his familiar ferry

  across the Styx to an island where skeletons dance.

  Einstein's romance with certainty is quite merry,

  he said, “I too believe in appearance,”

  he didn’t think Old One plays dice, takes chances.

  You bet your bottom dollar the universe

  rhymes with another universe like verse.

  Yeats, Herrick, and Herbert would like that.

  To them, I lift my hat.

/>   Delphic chaos is wise,

  metaphoric thinking multiplies

  bunches of grapes, by tripod, by butterflies.

  Chaos is endless longing—

  God’s pussycat.

  In Prague, Mozart knew a starling

  who sang his piano concerto all along,

  except for one note he always got wrong.

  MARCH 21, FIRST DAY OF SPRING

  Twenty inches of snow on the ground,

  I saw a swallow with a blade of dry grass

  begin to build a nest on my porch

  between an American Corinthian capital

  and a gutter, where he or she nests every year.

  Welcome, welcome! What can I do to help?

  I’ll stay in my warm house, get out of your way,

  I’ll watch out for raccoons, and eagles.

  I leave apples on the porch, seeds in a bucket.

  Where have you been all winter?

  I know Welsh swallows winter in Egypt.

  It makes me shudder to think you fly south

  from the Catskills to the Andes.

  The important thing is you’re back.

  Suddenly I am in the arms of spring.

  I love you but don’t know if you’re a mother

  or a father bird. I feel safe with you here.

  I think I’ll write the Times: better your nest

  than a flock of aircraft carriers in the harbor.

  GOOD MORNING

  1

  From the ship of life I see

  walls, ports, fences,

  barrels, orbits, the containing.

  I feign no hypothesis.

  Talk to me about years remaining,

  talk to me about wear and tear.

  Ptolemy accounted for planetary orbits

  viewed from earth, by adding epicycles,

  epicycles to epicycles. In his world

  planets performed the loop-the-loop,

  which became a child’s game,

  given up for smart phone warfare.

  Today, 11:30 a.m., I don’t believe

  “all time is eternally present.”

  I walk door to door,

  the Universe appears and will disappear,

  finally end with hunger,

  no light or darkness left.

  2

  When I was 17, a seaman,

  I learned death was not a bookend.

  I saw friends’ bodies, half-afloat, half-sinking

  off the bloody Atlantic shelf.

  I would not eat bloody bread.

  On duty, I accused an anti-Catholic,

  anti-Black officer of sedition.

  I sang, “Trust thou in the Lord.”

  I did not trust Him,

  I was establishing my heart.

  At liberty, I scribbled near Asylum Street,

  “Timothy was right”:

  the love of money is the root of all evil.

  Out to sea, I asked where are the dorsal fins

  going when I first read Gerard Manley Hopkins,

  I was thrown against a bulkhead: I saw

  him, her, formal and informal you, we, they in russet clad

  swim every day in the English Channel or China seas—

  while ice-cutting poetry word by word

  makes its way at five beat, ten knots

  to Soviet Murmansk, then reverses course

  south to and through no one’s Antarctic.

  A song nobody sings outside my window:

  You are my sea of loneliness,

  sure as the sky is sometimes blue, I and you,

  temporary pronouns, in the country and in the towns,

  all past, present, and future—old wives’ tales,

  last words, personal, particular, concrete.

  All architecture is finally dust.

  On the ship of life, I have a hammock, not a berth.

  I swing with the ocean, forward, halfway back,

  then forward again,

  thousands of miles of breakers, green and blue,

  mountains of choirs and soloists, prosody

  of the oceans, the meter and free forms, translations,

  lyric communion.

  3

  Despite the parallel lines of the Psalms,

  Einstein proved parallel lines, like tram tracks

  in Zurich, eventually meet. His time and space

  versus Henri Bergson’s “No certainty,

  probability, duration, Claude Debussy.”

  Henri vs. Albert: uncertainty versus certainty

  with no up and down, no right and left before

  and after. All time eternally present, tonal

  and atonal. Parallel lines meet—

  just look down the railroad tracks

  toward the horizon, Igor Stravinsky. Firebirds.

  There is no dark lady of the bawdy planets.

  I refuse to live in places out there

  without a sun, East or West—without a stage.

  Backstage, made up, facing my mirror,

  being and acting. The play’s the thing:

  The sexual Universe has his menstrual.

  The lonely universe attracted by a beauty

  pulls another universe into bed,

  knows what black holes are made for.

  The unripeness and unreadiness all.

  Can the truth be triangles, circles,

  a universal romance?

  The word, the meaning of Another,

  becomes every part of speech, re-Babeled languages.

  I hear, I do not see, the play.

  I think the planets are God’s castanets.

  He is a flamenco dancer, Creation, dark song.

  Every fingernail a star, I have my hands full:

  a half moon is a relic, fires are sometimes frozen.

  I wear a worm, a ring around my finger.

  The way I tell time: I sell time by the dozen,

  12 noons and 12 midnight eggs.

  You can eat time scrambled, hard-boiled,

  as an omelet or soufflé Grand Marnier.

  * * *

  This poem is a blind actress walking in town

  without a dog or cane. Blind poetry makes

  right guesses, before and after.

  She walks in beauty like the morning,

  crosses the street

  without tripping, wishes Good Morning

  to strangers. She can tell where she is

  by their replies or silences.

  She smiles at lampposts and trees,

  speaks to them as if they were listeners.

  We are on good terms, often speak.

  She does not see the blackness in the dark.

  Sometimes she can see blinding light,

  beside her two thieves, Day and Night.

  LISTEN

  No night, no dawn, inside the earth, there were

  flaming oceans without a center, nothing was born.

  Above the tideless breakers, firefalls,

  ageless fires that had no English name,

  made their way to the sublime,

  flaming gardens, flowers of good and evil—

  never seen colors that were intimate,

  changing red rock blooming ochre fires,

  no clouds. The sky was earth.

  Rivers unprisoned themselves, firestars, volcanoes

  broke out into icy virgin waters, creating

  the first living things: two cells, invisible threads,

  with needs, a holy collision. Call them desires,

  wants, necessities, a need for another.

  A stone thrown up needs to come down,

  darling multiplicities.

  First one cell and then the other came to be from fires

  into glacial waters, swam a little,

  licked to life the color ochre off the rocks.

  Were there flowers of good before flowers of evil?

  There were human voices before there was writing,

  the most
beautiful instrument a woman,

  man or singing child. To hear the written word,

  I read aloud, “What is love? ‘tis not hereafter;

  Present mirth hath present laughter.”

  Idle reader, the secret is to listen.

  I did not hear the first fires enter the icy waters—

  they once made a daylily, a flower of good.

  I favor the fleurs du mal quartier in the woods.

  I cup my hand over my ear.

  SILENCES

  Good morning, electorate.

  We are on good speaking terms

  but do not speak, which means

  we must be self-reliant,

  there are many matters at hand.

  We’re not close enough to know each other’s

  good news, bad news, private matters.

  There are silent streets off public gardens

  for intimacy and come-what-mays.

  There is library silence and deadly silence

  that is a private matter.

  There is happiness written in white

  and silent writings, meters overheard.

  Silent are the voices I no longer hear—

  after the first word spoken I’d recognize who’s there.

  There is a playwright’s staging called “business,”

  silent instructions without dialogue,

  and the silence that says, “none of your business,”

  but I have an office, a religion,

  that holds me responsible for everything.

  I hardly lift a finger to stop the slaughtering.

  It’s a little like putting a nickel or a dime

  in a cup and writing this against death,

  raking leaves against the changing seasons.

  My memory is like the first sound picture,

  The Jazz Singer. I am screening:

  it must have been October, 1927,

  I remember skipping along Liberty Avenue,

  before I learned to dance, I sang,

  “Hoover in the ashcan, Smith in the White House.”

  Later in Catalonia I danced the Sardana—

  with its opening and closing circles

  that made free and equal the young and old,

  while the soulful tenora, a revolutionary woodwind,

  played the dance forbidden by Generalissimo Franco.

  Further back again toward first silences—

  alone in the Charleville of my den,

  I smoked Rimbaud’s clay pipe,

  I thought “I will never die.”

  I’m simply telling the impossible truth

  that made my later studies more difficult.

  When I first shaved my fake oxtail beard

  invented by Cervantes, I fought back